With our crippled health services, inadequate care services, local authorities in or approaching bankruptcy, crumbling schools and other public buildings, overflowing prisons. pothole-pitted roads, inadequate housing, overcrowded roads, failing public transport, falling pound, reducing life expectancy and declining international standing it is difficult to describe the UK as anything other than failing.
It is tempting to see this failure as a result of the shambles of the Johnson and post-Johnson governments, or maybe the policy of public sector austerity since 2020.
However, if believe the real causes go much further back, at least to 1945
They can be categorised under five headings.
Exceptionalism
Our part in the victory (alone and unaided?) in the Second World War generated, the delusion of British exceptionalism: we were somehow a super-clever people and the world should learn from us rather than for us to learn from them. We have consequently failed to subject our institutions to critical examination and to look to other countries for examples of how to do things better (Why should we? Our systems are the best in the wold and the envy of the world).
Our “winner takes all” electoral system
We have clung on to the dysfunctional First Past the Post system for electing MPs, which, after all but one post-war election, has handed virtually unfettered power to governments supported by only a minority of the electorate, and with few checks on their enthusiasms. Constructive argument has been avoided and elections fought on slogans and presentation rather than reason. The campaigns have become increasingly less truthful.
Neo-liberal economics
The wholesale adoption of the neo-liberal economic policies of privatisation and deregulation by the Thatcher government elected in 1979, and pursued even more damagingly since.
Over-centralisation.
Political power is concentrated in Westminster and Whitehall with little devolution or fund-raising powers to the nations, regions and local government. What autonomy local government had in the Victorian era has been gradually whittled away
Money and the press
Finally, public opinion has been and continues to be hugely distorted by inadequate limits on financial contributions to political parties and ownership of the press, which has led to one party having unjustifiable dominance over the media.
There is no sign that either of the two major parties are likely to alter any of the above. The Tories love them, and Labour lacks the courage to do other than tinker with the system. An infusion of Liberal Democrat and Green MPs might just “break the mould (remember that?)
One way we might achieve it is to insist on the setting up of Citizens’ Assembles to hammer out the fundamental root and branch reforms we need if we are to stop the rot of our gradual exit from the ranks of competent and effective developed democracies.